The new paradigm of cooperative communications is a promising resolution to carry
out MIMO technique. In this thesis work, we study the performance of cooperative
relay networks in which the transmission from a source to a destination is assisted
by one or several relaying nodes employing amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-
and-forward (DF) protocols. The performance of two-way (or bi-directional) AF relay
networks, which are proposed to avoid the pre-log factor 1
2
of spectral efficiency, is
latter investigated. Specifically, the exact closed-form expressions for symbol error
rate (SER), outage probability, and average sum-rate of bi-directional AF relay systems
in independent but not identically distributed (i.n.i.d.) Rayleigh fading channels are
derived. Our analyses are verified by comparing with the results from Monte-Carlo
simulations.